Old Roads, New Stories: A Literary Series
This isn’t a typical ghost story, so I might as well say that in advance. For one, it’s a poem. And for two, the ghosts aren’t poltergeists. They’re less Halloween and more Día de los Muertos. And third, every single word of it is true:
Still Life with Ghosts
Our house is built on a seabed.
Count back far enough, and almost everyone’s is:
First, fire; and then water;
then the two of them combining into air,
plus buckling some deep-down rock
so it can rise, click together into continents.
What’s next depends on your timeline.
And even then, the dead might disagree,
like the voices I hear when no one else is home.
Not in this room, or that room either,
not the radio on, no people on the sidewalk,
but voices—something talking—somewhere near.
Nothing stays silent, I guess. Look at me,
tossing words across the Great Salt Lake.
It used to be an Inland Sea.
I used to be young.
Rob Carney’s first collection of creative nonfiction, Accidental Gardens, is out now from Stormbird Press, and his new book of poems, Call and Response, is available from Black Lawrence Press. Previous books include Facts and Figures, The Last Tiger is Somewhere, The Book of Sharks, and 88 Maps.
Read an interview with Rob Carney appearing in Terrain.org: “The Ocean is Full of Questions.”
Read Rob Carney’s Letter to America in Dear America: Letters of Hope, Habitat, Defiance, and Democracy, published by Terrain.org and Trinity University Press.
Read poetry by Rob Carney appearing in Terrain.org: 6th Annual Contest Finalist, 4th Annual Contest Winner, and Issue 30. And listen to an interview on Montana Public Radio about The Book of Sharks.
Header photo of Great Salt Lake, Utah, by Peter J. Nolan, courtesy Shutterstock.
